The National Guard still has enough money available to complete training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets despite the U.S. running out of funds to send additional weapons and assistance to Kyiv, the top of the Guard Gen. Dan Hokanson said Thursday.
President Joe Biden announced in August that the U.S. would begin training Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 as a part of a multinational effort to supply Ukraine with the advanced fighter jets. Pilot training began in October at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson, Arizona.
Since then, the Ukraine war fund that the U.S. has used to send billions of dollars in other weapons systems and assistance to Ukraine has run out of cash while Congress has struggled to pass latest aid.
The shortage of funding has meant the U.S. has not been capable of send any latest weapons packages to Ukraine despite a brutal bombardment campaign by Russia. However the pilot training has been capable of proceed, Hokanson said.
“We do have the resources to proceed the training that’s already began,” Hokanson said, and get that initial tranche accomplished this yr. “If we determine to extend that, obviously we’ll need the resources to coach additional pilots and ground support personnel.”
The most recent laws that may have approved greater than $60 billion in aid for Ukraine was scuttled by a small group of House Republicans earlier this week over U.S.-Mexico border policy; a last-ditch effort Thursday the Senate was again attempting to get support for a standalone bill that may fund each Ukraine and Israel’s defense needs.
Ukraine’s leaders have asked for fighter jets from the West for the reason that earliest days of the war. For the primary yr and a half, the U.S. and other allied partners focused on providing other weapons systems, citing the jets’ cost, concerns about further scary Russia, the variety of deadly air defense systems Russia had covering Ukrainian airspace and the problem of maintaining the jets.
Ukraine’s leaders have argued that the F-16 is much superior to their existing fleet of Soviet-era warplanes. In some cases, the U.S. has found ways to deliver a number of the advanced capabilities without providing the actual jets.
For instance, Air Force engineers found ways to switch the HARM air-to-surface anti-radiation missile in order that it could possibly be carried and fired by Ukrainian-flown MiGs. The missile and its targeting system enable the jet to discover enemy ground radars and destroy them.
Tara Copp is a Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press. She was previously Pentagon bureau chief for Sightline Media Group.